The comfort of building your own coffin

H.G. Wells got it right in his comic novel The History of Mr Polly, where the wake is so much more fun than the wedding breakfast. How often have you come home from a wedding feeling slightly nauseous from an overdose of cheap champagne and fake bonhomie? Yet a funeral can be heartwarming and inspiring; a celebration, a gathering, without the flimflam and interminable jollity.

But how many of us will make plans for that final reckoning? How many will decide on the venue, the music, the food and flowers? Most likely it will be your relatives who will choose the coffin in the funeral director’s brochure (£265 for cardboard, rising to £1,990 if you want one in oak with the Head of Christ carved on the side).

My cousin designed her own bier, upon which on a windy day last autumn she was carefully lowered into her grave at a woodland burial site in the Yorkshire Dales. She was wrapped in a cream linen shroud decorated with dark-green ivy leaves and small star-like flowers mostly stitched by her (she was not given enough time to finish it). Every-thing about her burial was determined by her, thought about for months, if not years.

She had been brought close to mortality when she was a teenager, suffering from cancer, and her approach to death was unusually frank, embracing what for others is something so terrifying it is usually ignored. She wanted to organise her own ending, at least as far as she could, and in this she succeeded brilliantly — even if in the end death came upon her in her fifties, without warning.

Recently I was reminded of our conversations about that bier — its wood, its Viking prow in tribute to her father’s origins in the far north of Scotland — by Cathy Fitz-Gerald’s latest documentary for the BBC World Service, Coffin Club (still available on BBC Sounds).